Blue on No Item Binding and Legendary Set Items

After Secondii broke the news yesterday, fans in the B.net forums picked up the question and got some more explanation from Bashiok. Why no binding of items in D3, dude?

If crafting isn’t the source of the best items in the game, people will tend to not salvage the items they found from MFing, which will inevitably affect the economy.

Bashiok: It’s one of the sources. If we do things right we’ll see end-game players with a mix of legendary, rare, and crafted items.

Any comment on why binding was ditched?

Bashiok: Yeah, we realized that binding is kind of a crappy way to pull items out of the economy. If you say that the average player produces 100 items an hour and maybe gets 1 upgrade in that time, then binding at best can account for removing 1% of items from the economy. And that’s being very generous at high levels.

Binding isn’t really substantial in making a viable economy, but it is really good at establishing item prestige. Which is how it’s used in WoW.

We expect salvaging to be compelling enough to remove a good percentage of the most valuable items from the economy. High end components obtained from salvaging high end items are needed for high end crafting and enhancement.

We’re not promising anything on patch content, but we also feel that keeping up on introducing new items consistently will keep it from being possible for a glut of the best items from building as ‘the best’ can be a constantly moving target.

Another new issue from the Jay Wilson interview was the changes to Set/Legendary items. Bashiok added some explanation about that as well, in the same post.

No set item parts/pieces? Or to clarify, will set pieces only be useful if the whole set is completed?

Bashiok: Set items are now legendaries defined by a set bonus. They’re crafted items while leveling (recipes can be found that grant the ability to craft all the items in a set), which allows someone to really invest in filling out a set before they out-level it. Then at max level we’ll drop set pieces normally.

Leveling up you will find recepies that will enable you to make a set. Every item in that set will be in the recipe list, enabling you to craft the set one piece at a time. When you hit max level, you will find the actual set pieces, not the recipes for the complete sets… That’s how I understood it.

Bashiok: Yeah, that’s it. Although recipes aren’t planned to actually stop dropping. You’ll just also have the items themselves drop in addition.